Angry Planet - ICYMI: The case for leaving Afghanistan

Episode Date: August 3, 2017

After thousands of American lives, literally billions of dollars and more than 15 years, the U.S. can’t seem to quit its longest war in Afghanistan. With no end in sight, no word on strategy from the White House and the NATO-backed leader calling for more troops to defend against the Taliban, it might be time to cut and run. Few know this as well as journalist and author Douglas Wissing. He’s spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, written two books on the subject and embedded with U.S. troops on the frontline. This week on War College, he walks us through why he thinks America should leave the Graveyard of Empires for good. By Matthew Gault Produced and edited by Bethel HabteSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. As I was doing research in Afghanistan, embedding with the troops, the troops started telling me that we were funding both sides of the enemy. The counterinsurgency was so messed up that we were literally funding both sides of the war. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines.

Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Gall. With us today is journalist Douglas Wissing. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, on the BBC and NPR. Since 2009, Wissing is embedded with troops in Afghanistan three times. He's been on the front lines of America's longest and often forgotten war. He also has a new book out titled Hopeless but Optimistic that details his experiences in Afghanistan and why he thinks it's time that America should leave. Now, the news out of Afghanistan is bad.

Kabul can't defend itself and the NATO-led mission doesn't have the troops to keep the Taliban from taking back territory. At the beginning of February, General John Nicholson came home to tell Congress that it needed to send more troops or risk losing Afghanistan forever. Doug, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. So my first question is, should America send more troops to Afghanistan? Well, like most of us, I follow General Nicholson's request for, quote, a few thousand more troops. And I think the first thing that came to my mind is, what would two? thousand more troops do that a hundred thousand couldn't the the Taliban as as you know has grown in

strength by double-digit numbers every year since at least two thousand five and are holding increasing amounts of territory and I it seems somewhat irrelevant to the conditions on the ground how did we screw this up so badly you know we've spent untold amounts of money to defend the country, take it back from the Taliban and reconstruct it, and thousands of American lives in more than 15 years. What happened that we got to this point? How did we get to this point? Well, you know, we invaded in 2001 with the intent of chasing the Taliban out of power

and taking away a haven for al-Qaeda. And we did that with great dispatch. You know, we could have declared victory and gotten the hell out of there. But then we changed the goals and we decided we wanted to give them a Western-style unitary constitution, a highly centralized constitution. And then we essentially impose the Afghan of our choosing Karzai. And Afghanistan has never had a centralized government. It's, you know, almost a medieval. kind of society and the way that things were traditionally done had to do with a very decentralized

way of doing things. So we set up this very centralized constitution, and then we poured in an enormous amount of money that destabilized the country. We set up a structure that allowed corruption to become centralized. That was the beginning of it, and then we got more engaged in Afghanistan. when it became an issue in our domestic politics, which of course the first invasion was post 9-11. And we then unleashed even more money on the country and we ignited more inflation. We increased corruption.

Afghanistan, when we invaded, was kind of in the middle of the pack in terms of corruption. It was a central Asian country that kind of was like a central Asian country where you had to distribute large-est. to be able to rule in any ways. And each year, as we were there, and each year as we kept pouring more and more money in, Afghanistan just started rising up the charts, rose with a bullet, as I like to say. And I watched it climb the charts

of the most corrupt governments on the planet. It was the middle of the pack, it was 15, it was 8, it was 5, and then finally it became number one. And it still remains among the most corrupt governments on the planet, as ranked by Transparency International. So we changed the game. Then we decided we were going to, I'm being a little facetious here, but not too much,

make Afghanistan the Switzerland of Central Asia, and we poured more money in with these vast nation-building exercises, and we then unleashed the counterinsurgency strategy. And what began to emerge, as I was doing research in Afghanistan, embedding with the troops. The troops started telling me that we were funding both sides of the enemy, that the counter insurgency was so messed up that we were literally funding both sides of the war. And at first, I thought it was just soldiers grousing.

You're out in Taliban country and armored vehicles, and people are tense, and they work things off. But I started asking around. I started talking to officers, and I began to understand that, yeah, that was the case. were a good chunk of all the money that the U.S. was spending in Afghanistan was being skimmed by the Taliban in various ways. There was a, I came back and I started doing hundreds of interviews with everyone from generals to security grunts on the ground, from low-level contractors, up to ambassadors and Congress people. And what I learned was that there was essentially

a toxic network that connected ambitious American careerists, for-profit American corporations, both military industrial and development industrial corporations, corrupt Afghan insiders, typically often government officials, and the Taliban, everybody was in on the take. And one really smart intelligence guy one day on an embattled, and embattled forward operating base in Logman province, he said to me, it's the perfect war.

Everyone is making money. And so that led to the first book I wrote on the Afghan War, which is funding the enemy, how U.S. taxpayers bankroll the Taliban. That was a book with thousands of citations that was rooted in this mountain of government reports and think tank reports and media reports that I had used to understand that whole situation.

So then I returned to Afghanistan to write hopeless but optimistic journeying through America's endless war in Afghanistan to try to understand had there been any lessons learned. I mean, we all know about all of the government inquiries, the congressional inquiries, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, all of his reports. I was curious to see had there been lessons learned.

And so hopeless but optimistic is about my journeys across the war zones to see what we had learned, to see if things were different, to see if there was any hope for things turning around. And by the time I got done going through those war zones and embedding with various teams, I had to confess I was hopeless. So then the optimistic part is about me trying to understand where there are Afghan appropriate organizations that were doing sustainable things that did make a difference in Afghanistan in a way that would actually work. And so that's the optimistic part.

So, okay, tell me about one of those organizations. Give me a little bit of hope before we dive back into the darkness. That's fair. I've been thinking more about reasons why I'm optimistic. But there's a few that come to mind, and one particularly I thought really was a model for what could be happening. And again, it was soldiers that told me about this group. There is a group called the Dutch Committee for Afghanistan. They've been operating in Afghanistan for many, many decades, going back to the King's Day, as I recall.

And I went to visit with them, and I got to know them. And they do this incredibly simple thing. You have to understand Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on the planet. You know, roughly $400 a year per capita income, about 30 million people. 85% of the economy is essentially agrarians, a herding culture. That's what Afghanistan is. And what the Dutch Committee for Afghanistan does is they train Afghan tribal people to be paravats. So lots of goats and sheep and some of them.

horses and you know but that is a major basis of Afghanistan's ability to get to live and so they go to the tribes and they ask the elders do you have someone who would be good to be trained as a paravet and the tribal elders will present most oftenly a man but sometimes a woman they go off and they are trained as paravats then the Dutch committee does a very interesting thing very unlike the way that we do things is that they set them up in business. They make sure they have appropriate tools to be a pair of that. They make sure that they have good medicines. That's a real problem in Afghanistan counterfeit medicine. They give them a very simple setup. And they tell them, well, go back to your village and start up. Maybe you want to use a room in your house. Maybe you

want to rent some small place that would be on a thoroughfare where people go to market. and that's about it. They make sure they have access to good medicine. I think they give them some signage. And so the people go back and they start being part of the Afghan economy in an Afghan appropriate way. So it's $400 a year. There's a lot of barter.

So the guy's going to deworm the flock in exchange for a sheep or he's going to fill in the blank. But it's on that level as opposed to the way we do things where, you know, USAAAID is going to come in and build a $50,000 vet clinic that's going to get stripped of everything within a month or two, and, you know, we're going to set something up that's completely unsustainable on an Afghan level. And the man that I interviewed was an Irishman, and he was saying, well, you know, we have, I'm trying to remember if it was one and a half or two and a half expats on staff.

He said, there's me, and I've been doing development work for. decades and we have another I'm trying to think I think he was a man a Pakistani who was of Afghan extraction so that was the half-expat and everyone else of the hundreds of people involved with the Dutch committee for Afghanistan were Afghans they were just Afghans and he said you know we've worked with the you know the king and the Soviets and the Taliban when they were in power with the Americans now, you know, and he said, but we're going to be gone, and this can go on. This will just go on because it's appropriate.

It works. It's sustainable. So they gave me a lot of hope. I could see it. This fit Afghanistan in a way that did a lot of good. All right, but that's not the typical experience, right? Kind of like you said most of the time, U.S. aid or another foreign organization will come in and start a big project with big dreams. and then it, you know, it doesn't go the way anyone thought it would.

So I'm wondering, is it that we fundamentally didn't research this country and understand it before we went? There was, yeah, to a certain extent, I don't think we really understood Afghanistan. It's a pretty hard country to understand. There's a bewildering complexity of tribal relationships and ethnic groups and, you know, It's a tough country to understand for anybody, and particularly someone just kind of dropped in out of nowhere. You know, the other thing is, is there was just this enormous default for giant contracts, because we had these for-profit corporations that wanted big contracts. And the agencies wanted the big budgets to hand out because money is power in Washington. The politicians wanted to be able to say, well, see, we're really trying to do.

something and you know that translates into dollars we have spent on development alone in Afghanistan adjusted for inflation more than we have spent on the Marshall Plan this is a country of 30 million people that make 400 dollars a year we've spent well over a hundred billion dollars on aid in development when we invaded we invaded a basket case of a country it was at the bottom of virtually every human development indices, life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, electricity usage. It was at the bottom. So it's 15, 16 years later. We've spent well over 100 billion. And at the end of that, Afghanistan remains at the bottom of virtually every human development indices. The money was wasted.

It was what's called phantomade. The money went a thousand different directions. But it didn't help the people at the bottom. It didn't help the Afghans that it was supposed to. So thank you so much for listening to War College. We are talking today with Douglas Wissing about his new book, Hopeless But Optimistic, and how America has failed in Afghanistan. And I think it's fair to say at this point that we have. Thank you so much for listening to War College. We are back here with Douglas Wissing talking about his new book, Hopeless But Optimistic, and America's Failure in Afghanistan. Doug, earlier you had told me that a lot of the aid money that we were putting into

Afghanistan has been redirected to the Taliban. And that was not, that's not, I read a lot about Afghanistan and I talk to a lot of people. That's not something specifically that I'd heard about before. And I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit for us. Sure. The UN has estimated about 20% of the money that the U.S. spent in Afghanistan, both in aid development and in military logistics has ended up in the Taliban hands. And there have been task forces that the United States has set up to try to combat that, not very successfully.

They were very meagerly supported organizations, but they did what they could. But it was, yeah, everybody kind of knew that was what was going on. There were some cases where the estimate is the Taliban got $15 or $1,600 for every tanker of petrol that came through Afghanistan. You know, because the way it worked is you had these giant contracts for military logistics for development, whatever it was, and because we were operating in a war zone, it was a good part of each contract would go to security, 30 to 40 percent would go to security. and who were the security firms? Well, typically very well-connected Afghans owned behind it all.

Those were the Afghans that control those security firms. Those very well-connected Afghans are not going to go out and guard those trucks. Obviously, all they're doing is they're taking their 20% cut and they're subbing it off to somebody else. Who takes their 20% cut, they sub it off to somebody else. Eventually, you get down to a road has to be protected or a convoy has to be protected. Who do you sub it out to? In some cases, you subbed it out to the Taliban. They protected a road against themselves.

Like you said, it feels like then this war continues because, as someone told you, everyone's making money off of it. Is it really that simple? Is that why this thing has gone on so long? And also why we don't really talk about it in America anymore, right? It's not something I've heard the new president speak of, except for very briefly. Why do you think that we've kind of shut down this conversation? Why don't we talk about our longest war? It has become a forgotten war.

It obviously, it doesn't poll well, and it's not just this election. It was barely discussed in the previous presidential election. It's one of these things as I do talks with people. I can see how surprised they are when I explain to them it remains our largest military engagement. The Pentagon and the State Department requested $44 billion for fiscal 2017. And my understanding is that the request made for fighting ISIS in Syria is only 5 billion, so 44 billion to 5 billion. And, you know, there's still a lot of beneficiaries

for that continuing war. There are people that they're building their careers, there are, you know, war is a profit center in certain kinds of corporate. And that's where we are. And how does Congress get elected, of course, with the same people? People don't want to argue against their own pocketbooks. But it's also not something that the American public really talks about either. It's not something we put pressure on our Congress people about. No, but I'm finding people are increasingly getting engaged in it.

It's, you know, you're very timely in wanting to have the discussion. Is there a way for us to win? And what does winning look like? You know, General Petraeus back when he was the commander, he wouldn't even use that word, win. I don't know what it would look like. I think now it's kind of like, well, Kabul hasn't fallen yet. Maybe that's what victory looks like. The administration officials, the operant term that I hear floated around a lot now is stalemate.

You know, as I said, the Taliban has been growing. strength every year since 2005 by double-digit rates. They control 15% more territory today than they did last year by pretty conservative estimates. And the old special forces dictum has always been. If an insurgency isn't shrinking, it's winning. And from the way I'm looking at this, this is not a stalemate. It's a failed war. So do we just cut out then?

Do we just leave? Well, that was certainly, you know, we all remember the zero option when Obama was trying to work something out with Karzai. And it worked for the Soviets. They left. And, you know, I don't think there's a lot of enthusiasm in Russia today to reinvade Afghanistan. They, if anything, they're happy to have us there doing their work for them. Do you think the Taliban will take back the country if we leave? You know, let's see, I tend to say I'm a historian and not a futurist. I can't predict that. The government of Afghanistan, as we discussed, remains among the most corrupt on the planet.

It doesn't have a lot of popular support. It's also considered to be pretty ineffective to the point of being feckless. The security forces, as I'm sure you've seen the reports, it's commanded by a pretty corrupt officer corps. 20% of the security forces are essentially ghost soldiers that only show up on payrolls. And, you know, I've been around them. Certainly in my embeds, I have been with them as they were being trained for anti-IID work. I would not characterize them as having great morale. So the warlords, the old warlords, they're still around.

It's amazing how many of them are still around. And goodness knows they have armed themselves to the teeth, preparing for what they are probably rightfully considering to be the fall of the Afghan government. So who will come out of that? I don't know. It seems like it's something that the Afghans have to work out. And it's better for us to just get out of the way and let that country work itself out. Yeah, we've already, the American taxpayers are on the hook already for a trillion dollars for just the Afghan war. With the two post-911 wars, I think the total bill for what's going to be the final bill is somewhere about $6 billion,

not including the interest if I understand the economist correctly. So the question is do we have things that we should be doing with that money that are actually more important to our national interests? And there's a lot of people that argue we do. I mean, you know, just one fact is that our infrastructure is in such need of refurbishing and improvement. Where I think the American civil engineers grade for our infrastructure is, I think, a D plus. did get a plus on that. And we're short, something a little under $4 trillion to bring us back to where we should be, by their estimates.

So we have that, and we also have issues in Syria relating to ISIS. And we do have other issues. We have an increasingly powerful Chinese situation, you know, government to deal with. And of course, Russia. We all know Russia. So I think we just have to ask, is there, there's that, you know, you're sort of asking why, what are the reasons for optimism? And one of the ones that I have come up with is that relates to that great economics term,

some cost bias. You know, that phrase that economists remind us that we have to be careful to not look at our previous investment when we're making future investments. Smart business people know that you have to be careful to not throw good money after bad. And I guess I'm taking some solace in the fact that President Trump is a businessman who has declared bankruptcy four times. He's clearly not a guy who's afraid of pulling the plug on a lost cause or a bad investment. So when I hear American ambassadors or generals saying, well, we can't leave because of our investment, I think about some cost bias.

Okay, so I want to end the conversation on something that's not entirely depressing, which I feel like Afghanistan episodes often are. Your book is really funny, the new one. There's a lot of humor in it, and you have a whole chapter dedicated to bathrooms. How did you, was that a conscious choice to inject levity into a dark subject? Or was it very natural? I'm wondering about that choice. Well, you know, dark humor and war have gone together from the beginning. But there was also a decision on my part that these are really heavy subjects.

And I feel like the Grinch of the Afghanistan War, where I'm saying this hasn't gone well, it's not going well. It probably won't go well. And so I did make a decision to. inject humor in there just to kind of give people a chance to take a breath and hopefully they did I hope you laughed that was my intent there's you know the people I was giving a talk yesterday people wanted to talk about the the infamous Kandahar Poupon that I wrote about or you know the chapter that you referenced which is called shitholes for those that don't have delicate ears

and you know it's just a way to kind of think about, there's actually humans out there doing this. These are not broad, abstract kinds of things, a grand strategic vision. There's also these humans on the ground doing a really tough job, and we need to constantly be reminded of that. So, yeah, humor is a great way to do it sometimes. Douglas Wissing, thank you so much for joining us on War College. Thank you. Thank you for listening to This Week Show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Hedek.

Matthew Galt hosts and Rangles the guests, and it's produced by me, Bethelhab Day. Please keep your iTunes reviews coming. If you say something nice and clever, I just might read it on air. Please post any ideas for future shows or feedback you have to our Twitter page. We're at War underscore College. Thanks.